Advisor:  Dr. Jacqueline Woolley

The Question: Are children's fantastical beliefs constrained by their knowledge of the real world?

Why did we ask this question?
Because...The literature concerning children's cognitive development and theories of mind has traditionally expressed the Piagetian view of children as realists.  According to Piaget, young children are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and thus live in a miraculous world of magic and wonder.  While some subsequent researchers fully support Piaget's conclusions, many other researchers have found that Piaget underestimated many of children's cognitive abilities, including their ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. However, in spite of significant evidence of children's relatively sophisticated understanding of the physical world, like Piaget, these researchers also find that children do hold a number of fantasy beliefs.  So, it appears that understandings about the physical world coexist with beliefs that violate them.  Little is known, however, about how these two different ways of understanding the world actually interrelate and affect one another.  I hypothesized that children's knowledge of principles in the real world constrain their fantasy beliefs.

For a much more detailed review of the literature, check out my thesis introduction

So what did we do about this question?
Well...we investigated this issue through an experiment based on two studies.  One is by Vosniadou and Brewer who found that children's conceptualizations of the earth are constrained by their beliefs and knowledge about physical objects and their properties.  The other is by Wegner and Wheatley (1998) who discussed Michotte's (1963) analysis of physical causality. They suggest that three factors- priority, consistency, and exclusivity- determine people's perception of physical causality.  It could be possible that the perception of mental causality is also dependent on these three conditions being met.  This was tested in regard to children's fantasy beliefs using a wishing paradigm.  Three, 4-, and 5-year-old children's knowledge, experience, and beliefs in the efficacy of wishing were investigated through a short interview and a "wishing box task" in which children watched an adult confederate wish for small, everyday items to appear in a series of trick boxes.  In the course of the wishes, the three factors of causality were systematically manipulated - either honored or violated.  It was expected that children's beliefs in the efficacy of wishing would be affected by whether or not each of these three constraints (factors) was met.
    In addition to this main task, we were also curious about young children's theory of mind (see lit. review for further discussion) and how it might relate to children's beliefs in wishing.  To assess theory of mind, the children were also given two short, standard theory of mind tasks.  One investigated the children's understanding of false beliefs, while the other tested whether children could distinguish between fantasy and reality.  We were curious to see whether or not children's performance on these tasks predicted or was related to their beliefs in the efficacy of wishing.

Get the full scoop from my methods section
 

So what were the results?
Here's the short version...Fifty-six 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old boys and girls, recruited through the Children's Research Lab, participated.  As was expected, the results indicated that many children did demonstrate some belief in wishing, and that these beliefs decreased significantly with age.  Interestingly, it also appeared that significantly more girls than boys expressed belief in wishing across all three age groups.  This difference in belief between genders was unanticipated and warrants further investigation.  Most importantly however, the results supported, to an extent, our hypothesis that children’s beliefs in wishing are constrained by their understanding of real-world causal principles.  Children most often said that the wishes caused the items to appear in the wishing boxes when all  three of the causal factors were honored (Honored condition), and less often when each of the factors was violated.  The decrease in children's belief in wishing was statistically significantly different from the Honored condition when the factors of priority and exclusivity were violated. Violating the factor of consistency, however, did not result in a statistically significant decrease in children's belief.  These results seem to indicate that children’s understanding of causal principles governing the real, physical world tend to constrain their beliefs in fantastical causal processes such as wishing.  However, it is also apparent from these results that real-world knowledge is not the sole factor determining children’s fantasy beliefs, because many children demonstrated both strong real-world knowledge and beliefs in wishing.  Indeed, many adults also believe in fantasies that contradict their understanding of the real world.  This study provides some insight into the nature of children’s fantasy beliefs regarding wishing and also about their emerging understandings.
    The results of the theory of mind tasks indicated that, not surprisingly, children’s performance improved with age.  Children’s scores on these tasks did not appear to be correlated with their beliefs in wishing, as indicated by the interview and the Wishing Box Task.
 

For the full-length version of teh results plus, for no additional charge, an interpretation of these results, please see my  Results and Discussion sections.